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Thursday, February 2, 2012

Donna Nebenzahl - Beyond Macho: Defining a Man's World

This article was published in The Province, a newspaper out of Canada. The article looks at the demise of traditional macho masculinity and the struggle to prevent academic pissing wars between men's studies and feminism. Certain segments of the feminist community have not been kind to men, but setting feminism against men's studies (as the MRAs tend to do) is not a good solution.

Marc
Lafrance teaches courses on masculinity at Concordia University. "If we
can get men to feel that their lives don't need to correspond to this
mythic machismo, that will open them up to life experiences," he says.

Photograph by: Allen McInnis, THE GAZETTE

MONTREAL
— The male stereotype of the all-powerful protector and provider is
doing a disservice to men -- pressuring them to conform and ultimately,
leaving many powerless to face the challenges of modern society.

That’s
the thesis that binds many academics in the new area of masculinity
studies, who say their examination of how the culture of maleness
impacts men, rather than those around them, has been a long time coming.
While women’s studies have been gaining a foothold at universities
across the country since the early 1970s, academic courses and research
on men could barely be found, most often hidden under the umbrella of
gender studies.

Now, however, researchers who focus on the study
of men and masculinity are coming out of the cold. They are the
vanguard, whose theories are often used in newspaper and magazine
stories about how men are faring.

“Clearly it’s at a very nascent
stage in its development, in the humanities and social sciences,” says
Concordia University sociologist Marc Lafrance, who teaches about men
and masculinity as part of several courses on gender and sexuality at
the Montreal university.

But even though there are just a few
courses in masculinity studies given at the university level across
Canada, and no departments of men’s or masculinity studies, Lafrance,
35, says that since arriving at Concordia in 2006 after completing a PhD
at Oxford, “I went from supervising nothing on masculinity over my
first two years to supervising four students and then five and now,
we’re waiting to hear about the status of three new applications in our
graduate program in the upcoming year.”

The push to study
masculinity might be viewed as a logical extension of women’s studies,
which examines the problems of gender and the social construction of
sexuality mostly from a female perspective. In addition, there’s the
“masculinity crisis” widely discussed today — males under pressure from
societal changes.

“These two things together have created a
fertile context for study, and we’re starting to see concrete evidence
that this is becoming a full-fledged area of inquiry,” Lafrance says.

But
rather than looking only at men’s behaviour through the tired lens of
their power and destructiveness, he believes we need to look at how
masculinity “as a structure, as a lived experience, can also be
fundamentally disempowering to men.”

The aggressive arena of men’s
sports and its connection to serious emotional damage is being studied
by Concordia sociology graduate student Cheryl MacDonald, 24, who
interviewed a number of major junior hockey players about what
masculinity means to them.

“I find that hockey players are
socialized to adhere to more traditional forms of masculinity, being
very tough and competitive, and sometimes those practices become more
problematic — men committing suicide, drugs and alcohol and those head
shots,” MacDonald says.

The research attempts to understand how
these “masculine” behaviours are linked to the way in which young men
are socialized, how they express their values.

MacDonald began
considering men’s studies when she took an undergraduate course with
sociologist Anthony Synnott, who discussed the importance of studying
both genders.

“In my undergraduate experience in sociology, a lot
of courses on women and even courses about gender focused on women and
not much on men,” she says.

Synnott, who has been teaching a
course on the sociology of men for 10 years, wrote the 2009 book,
Redefining Men: Heroes, Victims and Villains, and currently writes a
column on men for Psychology Today. He believes that the rallying cry of
“male chauvinist pig” has ignored important realities that men face.
“Men dominate at the top and also the bottom,” he points out. “The vast
majority in prisons, victims of accidents, victims of work fatalities,
99 per cent of military fatalities — are all male.”

Men, argues
McGill University professor Paul Nathanson and his colleague Katherine
Young, suffer from the myth that they are the gender with the power and
therefore cannot be damaged by criticism and ridicule. The physical,
political and economic power that a small percentage of men do wield
renders women, they believe, “either unwilling or unable to see men as
fully human beings, people who can indeed be hurt, both individually and
collectively.”

Nathanson and Young have written five books
chronicling the rise of misandry, the hatred of men, which they view as a
culture war being fought because of the feminist activism that led to
the changed role of men.

But Lafrance and many of his colleagues
are eager to avoid setting men and masculinity studies up against
women’s studies. “We need to figure out what it is about masculinity in
our culture that is oppressive not just to women, but to men,” he says.

“Since
the 1960s and ’70s, the push was issues relating to the lives and
experiences and injustices faced by women. In my view, it was totally
appropriate that this kind of scholarship should have taken centre
stage, mainly because those forms of knowledge had been silenced for so
long.”

At this point, he considers it counterproductive for
theorists of men and masculinity to “organize our analysis around who
has more power and who’s in more trouble. There’s evidence to suggest
men have lots to deal with but it’s also true about women who confront
injustice on a daily basis.”

Only by looking at the issues contextually can you understand where the gender balance really lies, Lafrance says.

“There’s
lots of anti-male stuff out there and anti-female stuff,” Synnott
agrees, “and a lot of people are badly hurt by men versus women. We
should be noting the glory of female and male achievements.”

These
scholars note an increasing restlessness in the academic community over
the last decade, a need to shift the gaze to focus on men.

Acknowledging
“there’s sometimes a sense that we’re trying to re-appropriate centre
stage for the straight white guy,” Lafrance points out that in much of
the ongoing study claiming to be about women’s experiences, there will
be reference after reference to men — about their bodies, desires,
behaviour — without any real theories being put forward.

What
this means is that “men constitute a present absence around the work
that’s going on in the university,” Lafrance says. “There are
assumptions about men in gender studies, but men themselves aren’t being
seen as a legitimate object of inquiry.”

Never has an
understanding of masculinity been more urgent, because the stereotypical
macho man is not going to survive very long if he doesn’t adapt,
Lafrance believes. “The irony is the dominant norms of masculinity, what
the academics call hegemonic masculinity — the breadwinner, the guy who
never gets scared, the guy who is extremely successful — really make
for an unlivable life for men.

“These structures distance men
from themselves,” he says. “You can’t be a person who can feel, you
can’t be weak, you’re not allowed to be sad, to fail.”

Although he
discusses issues of masculinity with male friends, and many are
actively thinking about their roles as men, one of the reasons there’s
no coherent movement around this rethinking is precisely because talking
is so taboo among men, Lafrance says. “Talking about stuff in a
meaningful, considered way has always been associated with femininity —
traits like caring and sensitivity that many men are taught to eschew.

“One
of the key challenges is going to be how you form a movement when
dealing with a part of the population systematically taught not to
talk.”

Undergraduate courses on men and masculinity still
attract slightly more women than men, but the majority of graduate
students are men, Lafrance notes.

In doing her graduate research,
MacDonald has certainly come up against a code of silence among the
hockey players she has interviewed. “When asked about something like
hazing, it’s really hard to break through,” she says. “The coach would
say everything’s fine and we’re all best friends, but there are players
who are struggling with the common rituals of the sport and tell me
about the darker side of hazing and competition.”

After 14
interviews and 20 surveys, she has concluded that the code of silence
prevailed in her research. “It seemed that half of the people I spoke to
gave me the same story about how great things are and the other half
told stories about what they are able to get away with.

“We can’t really solve any of these problems of masculinity and hockey if people aren’t going to speak out.”

But
even in the classroom, Lafrance says, “my female students are more than
happy to talk about these issues, but the men are silent.

“Men
are not talking, especially not with other men. Just talking about
masculinity, acknowledging there’s something to talk about, seems to
transgress the conventions of our society.”

But when you
understand how power functions, the context in which men operate, you
realize it’s no way to live, he says. “It’s a model of masculinity built
on competition, success at all costs, it’s emotionally empty and
ruthless and focuses on a need to be constantly invulnerable.”

Men have got to realize, he says, that their silence reinforces the social structures.

“If
we can get men to feel that their lives don’t need to correspond to
this mythic machismo, that will open them up to life experiences.”

Synnott
says he believes the models of gender are slowly shifting. There was
the “romantic model in which we become a couple, the patriarchy model
characterized by unequal rights and the feminist model of female
superiority,” he says.

“Now we have the postmodern model in which gender is completely irrelevant.”